Originally published at: Germans efficiently repair manhole | Boing Boing
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While satisfying, the video misses the most exciting part: all the bureaucratic form-filling and signing and stamping without which none of this would have happened.
Joking aside, I’ll take this over the U.S. regularly allowing paved roads to revert to gravel, Sim City style.
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This doesn’t seem so fast or efficient compared to Mr. Manhole:
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Meanwhile in Hungary:
Peak efficiency.
Context: they spent a year renovating the street, made a huge deal out of finishing it, and then one day later: they’re taking it apart. Three possible explanations: 1. oops, wow, we just noticed something went wrong! 
2. everyone knew there was something wrong but the local government refused to move the deadline; 3. they intentionally did a bad job so that they could launder, I mean, spend some more public money on fixing it.
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US DOT: “Only two workmen?”
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As I understand it from friends in Montreal, that’s the SOP in the province of Quebec.
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You’ve obviously never lived closer to a manhole cover that went “klunk, klunk” every few seconds in heavy traffic.
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Haha, over here it goes like this:
- apply for EU money to fix public space (street, square, whatever)
- embezzle most of that money
- use the remaining little money to slap together something on the very cheap to show the EU if they ask
- contract companies belonging to you/your friends/your relatives/government or party members to do fix-up jobs
- “fix” the crap job you knowingly had done
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I wish you would write a science fiction screenplay/novel/musical Mr. B. (Or maybe you already have…?)
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It’s interesting, given how rich and car-obsessed we Americans are, how shitty our roads are. A German once told me that there isn’t a single street in Philadelphia that, if it were in Germany, it wouldn’t immediately be closed for emergency repair.
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This was surprisingly satisfying and compelling despite my paucity of German. The only word I understood contextually was “foulen”.
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I have an incomplete short story about a DIN standard! I can’t decide whether the standard is sentient, cognitohazardous, surreal, evasive, etc. House of Leaves but it’s an international engineering standard. A story structured like a database of standards. I’m pleased that you sensed this in such a short post!
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Fun as it is, I wish people would pump the brakes on using cultural stereotypes to explain why things work better in country A than country B. It lets governments off the hook for an astounding amount of shitty jobdoing.
If you want German maintenance standards or Dutch traffic planning or Swiss building design quality, you look at what they’re doing and then you do it. “But they’re foreign” shouldn’t be an excuse.
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The Mr. Manhole video benefits from a lot of cuts in the video removing the tedious act of resetting bolts between steps. It also leaves the road unusable for a day until the concrete sets.
The german system benefits from having a manhole that was designed to be replaceable. Within a few hours the roadway is usable.
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I recognise this sort of video, it’s the sort companies make to sell their product to communities. Which is why they are so efficient in placing this new and improved manhole in the street. The idea is to convince urban planners that they need to spend their road budgets on new manhole covers.
Order your ACO Schachtabdeckung Multitop Plus today!
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This guy. There’s always this guy. “Y’all got the cone seated on the barrel correctly? I remember this one time, I think it was back in 19 and 47, and we were having a hell of a time lining up the cone and the invert. I tell ya, I didn’t think we’d ever finish that job.”
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Oh, I don’t know.
-4 crew vs. 2 crew.
-More heavy machinery.
-Not covering the inside of the hole to prevent debris from falling in.
Or is it perhaps that the Germans didn’t overlay a rock music soundtrack?
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Different company, different clientele, and different intern in the marketing department choosing the soundtrack loop to use. One is selling the tools, the other is selling the manhole.
I think the difference is that the Mr. Manhole expects its customers to be the independent contractors vying for repair bids in the USA, the ACO advert is to the town planners who will be using city employees to do the job.
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Oh, I know. The comment on the music (besides being snarky) was that perhaps one process seems more “fast and efficient” because it had driving music behind it.
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Wunderbar!
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